The (Fluorescent) Future of Surgery

TEDMED just released a fascinating talk about color-coded surgery by Dr. Quyen Nguyen, a surgeon at the University of California San Diego. We’ve recently covered some pivotal developments in Nature Medicineand Science Translational Medicinethat describe the use of fluorescent probes to selectively illuminate cancer cells during surgery. Those projects resulted from international collaborations (The Netherlands, Germany, Indiana; Japan, Maryland), and Dr. Nguyen herself has been working with a team including Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Dr. Roger Tsien, so it is appropriate that she emphasizes in the talk that “successful innovation is a team sport.” Interestingly, her group has also worked on illuminating nerves so that surgeons are better able to avoid severing important connections. If the pace of this work continues, it may not be too long before surgical fields look more like Gray’s Anatomy pictures.

Shiv Gaglani is an MD/MBA candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Harvard Business School. In addition to curating the Smartphone Physical (www.smartphonephysical.org), he also contributes regularly to CardioSource World News and Emergency Physicians Monthly. He is interested in developing scalable, tech-based solutions for medicine and education; to this end he is the co-founder of the medical education tech start-up, Osmosis (www.osmosis.org).
More about Shiv: http://about.me/sgaglani